insitro Announces Leadership Team Expansion to Support Advancement of Machine Learning Enabled Drug Discovery and Development Efforts

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company, today announced the expansion of its leadership team with the appointments of several industry leaders:

• Martha Rook, Ph.D., chief technical operations officer
• Jevan Soo Lenox, M.P.P., MBA, chief people officer
• Ellen Berg, Ph.D., vice president, biomarker sciences
• Theofanis Karaletsos, vice president, data science/machine learning

“Our vision at insitro is to bring together the ability to generate biological and chemical data at unprecedented fidelity and scale, alongside the incredible capabilities of cutting-edge machine learning methods to extract insights from these data, towards the goal of deconvoluting disease biology and developing new therapeutic interventions for patients,” said Daphne Koller, Ph.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of insitro. “To successfully achieve this, we must bring together a team that spans a broad combination of skills: biology, technology, machine learning, drug discovery, translational science and company building. Martha, Jevan, Ellen and Theo bring extensive experience across all of these areas, and their addition to our team will hugely enhance our capabilities as we head into a pivotal year at insitro.”

Martha Rook, Ph.D., Chief Technical Operations Officer
Martha Rook, Ph.D., is an experienced industry leader who brings more than 20 years of academic and industry experience in molecular biology, diagnostics development, biologics process development and cell and gene therapy manufacturing. She joins insitro from Sigilon Therapeutics, where she served as chief technical operations officer and was responsible for the analytics, manufacturing, supply chain and quality organizations. Martha spent 13 years at MilliporeSigma, where she held a variety of roles, ultimately serving as vice president and head of the Gene Editing & Novel Modalities Business and led a team developing and providing tools and services for cell and gene therapies from discovery to manufacturing. Martha received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from MIT and holds a B.S. in chemistry from Texas A&M University. She pursued postdoctoral studies in neuroscience as a Lefler Fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Neurologic Diseases.

Jevan Soo Lenox, M.P.P., MBA, Chief People Officer
Jevan Soo Lenox, M.P.P., MBA, brings to insitro more than 15 years of experience building transformative, high-growth, global companies across a variety of industries and making their talent and culture a strategic advantage. He was most recently the chief people and culture officer for Stitch Fix, an apparel e-commerce company combining data science and human stylists. There, he helped grow the company to 10,000 employees globally and successfully launched multiple new businesses, which quickly grew to hundreds of millions in sales. Prior to Stitch Fix, Jevan held people operations and business leadership roles at Square and was chief people officer at Blue Bottle Coffee during phases of dramatic revenue and headcount growth and global expansion. He began his career at McKinsey & Company in their Boston, New York and Shanghai offices as a management consultant serving technology, healthcare and nonprofit clients, as well as leading McKinsey’s Asia-Pacific recruiting strategy across twelve countries. Jevan received his MBA from Harvard Business School, his master’s in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. in East Asian studies from Harvard College.

Ellen Berg, Ph.D., Vice President, Biomarker Sciences
Ellen Berg, Ph.D., is a scientific leader in translational human biology for drug discovery who brings deep experience in the development and commercialization of new technologies for translational research. Before joining insitro, Ellen was chief scientific officer of translational biology for Eurofins Discovery, developing new scientific directions for the company’s in vitro pharmacology and phenotypic profiling data and analysis services. During her biopharmaceutical industry career, she co-founded BioSeek, where she led the development of the BioMAP® human primary cell-based assay platform. Ellen holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and completed postdoctoral work in the Butcher lab at Stanford University in the Department of Pathology, where her research interests included drug and toxicity mechanisms of action, phenotypic drug discovery, and predictive methods for product safety and efficacy testing.

Theofanis Karaletsos, Vice President, Data Science/Machine Learning
Theofanis Karaletsos joins insitro from Facebook, where he was a staff research scientist in the Probability Organization, working on probabilistic treatments and robustness of neural networks and probabilistic programming. Previously, he was a founding member and senior researcher at Uber AI Labs in San Francisco, where he worked on machine intelligence. In his earlier roles, Theo was a researcher at artificial intelligence startup Geometric Intelligence, which was acquired by Uber to form Uber AI Labs, and was a researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Apart from his track record of top-tier machine learning publications in venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI, AISTATS, ICLR, JMLR and more, Theo has published interdisciplinary work in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops on biology, healthcare and drug discovery. Theo did his Ph.D. work in machine learning and bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

About insitro
insitro is a data-driven drug discovery and development company using machine learning and data at scale to transform the way that drugs are discovered and developed for patients. insitro is developing predictive machine learning models to discover underlying biologic states based on human cohort data and in-house generated cellular data at scale. These predictive models are being brought to bear on key bottlenecks in pharmaceutical R&D to advance novel targets and patient biomarkers, design therapeutics and inform clinical strategy. insitro is advancing a wholly owned and partnered pipeline of biologic insights and molecules in metabolism and neuroscience. Since formation in mid 2018, insitro has raised over $700 million from top tech, biotech and crossover investors, and from collaborations with pharmaceutical partners. For more information on insitro, please visit the company’s website at www.insitro.com.